Quake speedruns slightly marred for me

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about why I don't really watch speedruns anymore, even though I used to be a huge and avid fan 20 years ago. The (quite long) article can be found here. The short summary is: While 20 years ago I didn't mind and in fact was fascinated by extensive glitch abuse, over the years I have grown tired of it and consider it so boring that I don't even watch glitch-heavy speedruns anymore. And, unfortunately, nowadays "glitch-heavy speedruns" covers about 90% of them, if not even more.

I mention in that post that Quake is one of the few games I still watch speedruns of, and the main reason is that, due to how glitch-free the game is, the speedruns are also almost completely glitch-free, and thus show just pure within-the-game sheer awesome playing skill without much if any game-breaking glitches.

I also say this in that post, quote:

"One particularly bad example made me outright want to puke: In a speedrun of the game The Talos Principle, the runner at one point would go to the main menu, go to the game options, set the framerate limit to 30 frames per second, return to the game, perform a glitch (that could only be done with a low framerate), and afterwards go back to the options menu and set the framerate back to unlimited. This was so utterly far-removed from gameplay proper, and was just so utterly disgusting, that I just stopped watching the speedrun right then and there."

Well, you might guess where I'm going with this.

Indeed, framerate abuse has been introduced into Quake speedrunning. It's not an extremely recent addition, mind you (I believe it was started being used several years ago). It's just that I only have noticed now.

I probably did not notice because the framerate abuse is so subtle, as a key can be bound to change the framerate cap, and thus it can be changed on the fly without having to go into any menus, and it doesn't interrupt the speedrun. The only visible indication of this is that a message appears on the top left of the screen telling about the settings change, and it's very easy to miss when watching the speedrun. The framerate is also changed so rarely during speedruns that it's easy to miss for that reason as well.

The game supports capping the framerate in steps of 10, with the minimum being 10 fps, and the maximum 100 fps. And the framerate abuse swaps between those two framerates. 

Quite naturally, I don't really like the idea much better than with other games, like The Talos Principle mentioned above. Some details about it, however, make it slightly less bothering though, so it doesn't really make me want to quit watching Quake speedruns:

1. As mentioned, it can be done on the fly rather than going to the settings menu to have to do it, so it doesn't interrupt the speedrun itself. Not that this would be the main reason to dislike the technique, but still.
2. As far as I understand, the technique cannot (so far) be used for any major skips and instead it can only be used in two very specific situations: To press buttons slightly earlier, and to reach the end slightly earlier.
3. And that "slightly earlier" really means it: At most 0.1 seconds can be saved this way for each button that has to be pressed and once at the end of the level (as a direct consequence of the framerate being 10 frames per second.) And even then, this is only when the button is right in front of the player (and is not eg. pressed from the side by barely glancing it.)

So in a typical level, where the speedrunner might have to press three buttons, about 0.4 seconds can be saved at most.

While I don't really like the technique in principle, it has so little effect on the speedruns that I consider this only an extremely minor annoyance.